# Generalizable Engagement Estimation in Conversation via Domain Prompting and Parallel Attention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14448 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14448/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [W2v-BERT: Combining Contrastive Learning and Masked Language Modeling for Self-Supervised Speech Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06209/) (2021)
- [Detecting Low Rapport During Natural Interactions in Small Groups from Non-Verbal Behaviour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.06055/) (2018)
- [MultiMediate '22: Backchannel Detection and Agreement Estimation in Group Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09578/) (2022)
- [MultiMediate'24: Multi-Domain Engagement Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16625/) (2024)
- [Multilingual Dyadic Interaction Corpus NoXi+J: Toward Understanding Asian-European Non-verbal Cultural Characteristics and their Influences on Engagement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13726/) (2024)
- [DAT: Dialogue-Aware Transformer with Modality-Group Fusion for Human Engagement Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08470/) (2024)
- [AsyReC: A Multimodal Graph-based Framework for Spatio-Temporal Asymmetric Dyadic Relationship Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05030/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Unified Agent: Managing Interactions across Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05729/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate engagement estimation is essential for adaptive human-computer interaction systems, yet robust deployment is hindered by poor generalizability across diverse domains and challenges in modeling complex interaction dynamics.To tackle these issues, we propose DAPA (Domain-Adaptive Parallel Attention), a novel framework for generalizable conversational engagement modeling. DAPA introduces a Domain Prompting mechanism by prepending learnable domain-specific vectors to the input, explicitly conditioning the model on the data's origin to facilitate domain-aware adaptation while preserving generalizable engagement representations. To capture interactional synchrony, the framework also incorporates a Parallel Cross-Attention module that explicitly aligns reactive (forward BiLSTM) and anticipatory (backward BiLSTM) states between participants.Extensive experiments demonstrate that DAPA establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on several cross-cultural and cross-linguistic benchmarks, notably achieving an absolute improvement of 0.45 in Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) over a strong baseline on the NoXi-J test set. The superiority of our method was also confirmed by winning the first place in the Multi-Domain Engagement Estimation Challenge at MultiMediate'25.